Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus
Introduction to RFID
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is the quintessential Pervasive Computing technology. Touted as the replacement for traditional barcodes, RFID’s wireless identification capabilities promise to revolutionize our industrial, commercial, and medical experiences. The heart of the utility is that RFID makes gathering information about physical objects easy. Information about RFID tagged objects can be transmitted for multiple objects simultanously, through physical barriers, and from a distance. In line with Mark Weiser’s concept of .ubiquitous computing.[20], RFID tags could turn our interactions with computing infrastructure into something subconscious and sublime.
This promise has led investors, inventors, and manufacturers to adopt RFID technology for a wide array of applications. RFID tags could help combat the counterfeiting of goods like designer sneakers, pharmaceutical drugs, and money. RFID-based automatic checkout systems might tally up and pay our bills at supermarkets, gas stations, and highways. We reaffirm our position as .top of the food chain. by RFID tagging cows, pigs, birds, and fish, thus enabling fine-grained quality control and infectious animal disease tracking. RFID technology also manages our supply chains, mediates our access to buildings, tracks our kids, and defends against grave robbers[6]. The family dog and cat even have RFID pet identification chips implanted in them; given the trend towards subdermal RFID use, their owner will be next in line.
Well-Known RFID Threats
This pervasive computing utopia also has its dark side. RFID automates information collection about individuals’ locations and actions, and this data could be abused by hackers, retailers, and even the government. There are a number of well-established RFID security and privacy
threats.
- Sniffing. RFID tags are designed to be read by any compliant reading device. Tag reading may happen without the knowledge of the tag bearer, and it may also happen at large distances. One recent controversy highlighting this issue concerned the .skimming . of digital passports (a.k.a Machine Readable Travel Documents[4]).
- Tracking. RFID readers in strategic locations can record sightings of unique tag identifiers (or .constellations . of non-unique tag IDs), which are then associated with personal identities. The problem arises when individuals are tracked involuntarily. Subjects may be conscious of the unwanted tracking (i.e. school kids, senior citizens, and company employees), but that is not always necessarily the case.
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